GNIRS has left the building | NOAO has completed construction and testing of the Gemini Near Infrared
Spectrograph (GNIRS). The instrument left Tucson on October 24 on its way
to be mounted on the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile,
where it arrived on October 27 (see bottom image). This
multi-million dollar, long-slit spectrometer will help astronomers make
measurements of the chemical abundances of stars in other galaxies, the
conditions at the centers of other galaxies (including very distant young
objects) and the initial mass functions for very young star clusters.